Australia joins US camp at UN

What is the meaning of Australia winning a seat on UN Security Council for the next two years?

It means that the United States and Israel now have an extra vote on the Security Council.

The declaration by the Gillard Government and Foreign Minister Bob Carr that their first objective will be world peace is just so much baloney.

Carr will direct Australia’s voting pattern at the UN where he is regarded as America’s man. He attached himself to the Washington circuitry decades ago and calls “Henry” (Dr Henry Kissinger) whenever he visits America.

The foreign policy junkies proclaiming the dawn of a new era in Australian foreign policy are going to be sadly disappointed. In every critical vote affecting war, peace, sanctions and imperialist intervention, Carr will be in the Washington-Tel Aviv camp. He will launch campaigns to save the whale, to protect elephants from ivory poachers and to prevent oil drilling in the Arctic and on Mars – but he won’t be condemning US drone strikes in Afghanistan, calling for the closure of the gulag at Guantanamo or supporting Palestinian statehood.

RADIOACTIVE INDIA

While on the subject of foreign policy, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has discovered India and elevated the teeming sub-continent to the status of “best friends”.

Central to the new bilateral love-in are uranium exports. Ms Gillard rammed the sale of uranium through the Labor Party conference in December 2011 despite the fact that India refuses to be a signatory to the global Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The other two countries that refuse to sign are Israel and Pakistan.

Australia’s double standard policy (feverishly pursued by Gillard and Carr) is as follows:

On one hand, Australia is willing to supply uranium to the non-signatory India which has nuclear weapons while on the other is joining the US and Israel in pursuing the “toughest-ever” sanctions against Iran which doesn’t have nuclear weapons.

Iran is developing nuclear energy to safeguard the country’s energy needs when its oil reserves run out. It is also preparing to join the nuclear weapons club because of the potential nuclear threat from Israel, the United States, Pakistan and India.

There is a double standard operating here and the countries of the Middle East and Asia are smart enough to know which camp Australia is in. And it isn’t theirs.

A POST MORTEM ON SLIPPERGATE

How long can Federal Labor MP Anthony Albanese continue to mesmerise the mainstream media and convince the Canberra Press Gallery he is a political genius?

“Albo”, the Leader of the House and the manager of government business, is the main culprit in the Slipper affair.

The appointment of the odious Liberal backbencher Peter Slipper to the Speakership of the Federal Parliament was the brainchild of Albanese.

The saga began in November last year when Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie announced that he was withdrawing his critical vote from the Government after it failed to deliver the anti-poker machine legislation he had demanded for his support.

It generated headlines such as, “Wilkie sinks Gillard Government” and “Gillard loses her majority” etc. But a careful reading of Wilkie’s statement – and clarifying statements he made in subsequent interviews – makes absolutely clear that Wilkie had not pulled the pin in the minority government and had no intention of bringing it down.

But that did not deter Albanese. He rolled out a crazy plan to demote the Labor Speaker Harry Jenkins and recruit Slipper, the veteran Brisbane Liberal, to take the presiding chair – plus a salary of a quarter of a million dollars, a grand office, a private staff, a chauffeur-driven limousine and free air travel – with ALP support.

He championed the Slipper deal arguing it protected the Government’s majority by reducing the Coalition’s vote by one.

What followed was 12 months of toxic publicity for the Gillard Government. Its electoral standing dive-bombed and Ms Gillard’s leadership and integrity were trashed with every new episode of Slippergate.

Albanese’s political buffoonery is all the more tragic because he was regularly paraded in the media and on the ABC as “the leader of left”.

He is not a leader of anything because the “left” does not exist in the ALP: it is a piece of political fiction.

The Slipper strategy has now crashed in ruins but there was a single article explaining the role of Albanese. That’s because he’s so media friendly that the gallery doesn’t want to burn him.